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Cane able to make comeback in Dracut

By Todd Feathers, tfeathers@lowellsun.com

Updated:
03/21/2016 12:49:03 PM EDT

Russell Taylor shows the Boston Post cane that he has had in his possession since he was 15 in 1955. Taylor says the cane given to the oldest resident in each of 700 New England towns in the early 1900s was given to him by the daughter of Dracut's then-oldest man, who died in 1955. Taylor will donate the cane back to the town once a suitable system for its preservation is in place. SUN/TODD FEATHERS

DRACUT -- Russell Taylor saw the cane, an ebony rod topped with a gold knob, and thought it looked just like the one Gene Barry carried when he played Bat Masterson on TV.

It was around 1955, and the young Taylor was with his aunt at her friend's father's house. The old man had recently died, and Taylor was helping the women clean out his leftover possessions.

"She wanted to give (the cane) to somebody young who would love it and appreciate it," Taylor said of the daughter of the deceased. "I was absolutely enthralled by it."

He took it home to Bridge Street and fought imaginary outlaws with it, just like Bat.

He didn't take much notice when, about a year later, the Boston Post printed its last obituary, stopped its presses and closed.

But long after the newspaper died, one of its quirkier advertising promotions would live on.

The paper had sent 700 ebony canes with engraved gold tips to towns throughout New England. Each came with instructions to give the cane, with the Post's compliments, to the oldest male resident.

When he died, the cane was to be passed to the next oldest living male, and so on and so forth.

In August 1909, the canes landed in the hands of octo- and nonagenarians throughout the region.

Dracut's was awarded to Peter Cavanaugh, an Irish immigrant who worked as a laborer and school janitor in Collinsville.

"He occasionally went by horse-drawn vehicles to Newburyport Mass," Arthur Colburn wrote in a local newspaper on Dec.

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13, 1962. "That port at that time was a point of entry for immigrants to the United States. There he met newcomers from across the ocean and brought them to Dracut. Here he found homes for them sometimes providing them with land from his farm on which they built their own homes."

Like much of the information in that article, Colburn's writings about Cavanaugh were uncovered by Hector Berube and shared with The Sun.

Cavanaugh would have been 87 or 88 when he received the cane in 1909. He had passed on, one way or another, by the time U.S. Census recorders made their way through Dracut in 1910.

Colburn's writings about the Boston Post cane elicited letters from several of his readers, who informed him about several of the cane's subsequent holders.

D. Steadman Fox held it at one point, his son, Harry M. Fox, told Colburn. But Franklin P. Fox did not, according to his niece, Hattie Johnson.

Colburn wrote: "He qualified as the oldest living male citizen of Dracut at the time but he declined to accept it. Possibly on the grounds that he felt too young. They do say that we are only as young as we feel."

The last holder Colburn definitively identified was Ingram B. Bennett.

Bennett was 92 at the time of the 1940 Census. Born in Nova Scotia, he was a retired carpenter who lived with his son, Fred, on Swain Street.

After Bennett, the cane's path remains a mystery until it turned up in the hands of young Russell Taylor some 15 years later. Taylor cannot remember the name of his aunt's friend or her father.

Of the 700 towns that received Boston Post canes, 493 have been identified by the Boston Post Cane Information Center. The center a clearinghouse for information that is hosted by the Maynard Historical Society -- not a dedicated research group or secret society of cane lovers, clarified its curator, David Griffin -- that posts updates about the canes from local historians or town officials.

"For a publicity stunt by a newspaper, it's pretty fascinating," Griffin said. "It's sort of morphed from this little bit of honorarium into a tradition that people put a lot of value in."

Taylor, a former Lowell police officer and a current member of the Dracut Housing Authority's board of commissioners, has known his Bat Masterson cane is actually the Boston Post cane for a while now.

The opportunity presented itself after Selectman Cathy Richardson brought up the cane at a meeting on Jan. 26. Without knowing that it was mounted on a wooden beam in Taylor's kitchen, Richardson had begun inquiring around town and with the Dracut Historical Society as to its location.

The town and its Boston Post cane will soon be united once a suitable system for its preservation is in place.

After all, in Dracut and elsewhere, the things have a habit of getting lost.

Follow Todd Feathers on Twitter and Tout @Todd Feathers.

* The cane was distributed to 700 towns in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island in 1909.

* It was given to the oldest male resident of each town until 1930, when, in a controversial decision, eligibility was opened to women as well.

* The canes were made by J.F. Fradley and Co., a New York manufacturer, from ebony shipped in 7-foot lengths from the Congo in Africa.

* In addition to Dracut, other local towns that have located their canes include Acton, Ayer, Bedford, Burlington, Carlisle, Chelmsford, Concord, Dunstable, Groton, Harvard, Littleton, Pelham, N.H., Salem, N.H., Tewksbury, Townsend, Westford. (Wilmington was given a cane but, like Dracut's until that was recently found, does not know its whereabouts.)

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